THERE WAS A time – must have been somewhere between ’81 and ’83 – when everything clicked. Just for a brief period, dancing to a machine seemed like a great idea to everyone. The public got what the public wanted, and the little black boxes ticked (…and fizzed and rumbled).
Then it all became confused. Drummers re-emerged and, lessons learnt, struggled to produce more by playing less – steady grooves through clenched teeth. The machines, gradually losing popularity whilst increasing their sales, now came armed with the sound of real drums (samples, presumably, of real drummers) and programming systems capable of real expression – in real time. Everywhere the call was for programmers who could inject an element of “feel” into their rhythms – and for drummers who could lock into the relentless pulse of the click track.
Then someone (somewhere in New York) remembered the days when machines were machines – and hey, “…a lot of those Kraftwerk tracks really were seminal, you know?”. So began the quest for the remnants of that former age – and the search for jack to 5-pin DIN leads to connect them up with (sic).
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